The Karate Kid and the emasculation of martial arts in the US

**Wounded Ronin** · Posted On: 3/12/2005 12:16am

Originally Posted by Omar

This seems to be the crux of why everyone around here hates that movie so much:

I can only figure that "The Karate Kid" must have been the first fucking MA movie you'd ever seen in your pathetic little lives because THAT is the basic structure of countless CLASSIC gong fu fu movies especially from the golden age of chop socky, the Shaw Brother's era. Doesn't anyone remember "Shaolin Temple" where one poor sucker gets stuck in the kitchen mixing all the rice with a 10 foot pole so he can reach all of them and in the end he becomes the top spear fighter of the whole temple? Then his buddy who was stuck loading firewood for the kitchen ends up with the ultimate tiger claw grip AVA! Sucker number 3 is given the task of laying out the copied sutras on all those pointy rocks to dry and he learns the ultimate "lightness skill" (can jump over buildings and ****)

There's folktales like that all throughout China and I assume Japan as well. It's a standard convention of the genre.

*pfft* amateurs.

Yeeeees, we know, but none of those films were as mainstream as The Karate Kid and Enter The Dragon. You have to consider that the average American who saw these films did not know about these genre cliches.

**felixmeister** · Posted On: 3/12/2005 1:11am

I like the article Ronin. The only problem I can see is the misuse of the term passive-aggressive. Daniel was not a passive-aggressive character, he exibited one or two traits at most and one of them ( a sense of victimisation ) was due to actually being victimised. The PA will exibit a sense of vitimisation, but it will not be due to being victimised per-se but to a belief that things ar not his/her fault. And besides exibiting this single trait is not enough to be classified as PAPD.

**patfromlogan** · Posted On: 11/20/2011 3:39pm

let this be an article?

**TheMightyMcClaw** · Posted On: 12/05/2011 8:39pm

Originally Posted by patfromlogan

let this be an article?

For realz. I recently reposted this on facebook.

**dr_seth_l** · Posted On: 12/10/2011 1:56am

I brushed this thread off at first, but that was an excellent article. I agree with the two posts above me: put this in some other format? It was sweet. And now I want to rewatch those movies with this new perspective.